The Engine

St Joan by Bernard Shaw at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast Production information Press night  September 15, 2016 Authors       George Bernard Shaw Adaptation         Philip O'Sullivan Director      Jimmy Fay Set         Grace Smart Lighting      Ciaran Bagnall Sound          Conor Mitchell Technical    Keith Ginty (technical manager), Philip Goss (set builder) Stage manager          Kate Miller (company stage manager) Production manager       Alan McCracken Cast includes     Alan McKee, Abigail McGibbon, Lisa Dwyer Hogg, Rory Nolan, Philip O’Sullivan, Tony Flynn, Kevin Trainor, Eimear Fearon Casting        Clare Gault Producer     Lyric Theatre, Belfast Running time2hrs 30mins There have been countless theatrical depictions of Joan.  She is a character in Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part 1 (1590) where her initial piety is exposed and she is rightly, according to Shakespeare, burned at the stake.  Shakespeare’s depiction is often seen a

GEORGIA O’KEEFFE at the TATE MODERN The new major retrospective of the American artist Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) at the Tate Modern follows a conventional re-telling of the narrative of the artist’s life. The early work, development and maturity, fame, the final years and the visionary final statements. The chronological narrative begins with the artist working in black and white, charcoal and pencil, in order to develop an abstract style and a truly American form of Modernism.   Georgia O’Keeffe was born in 1887 in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, a northerner and daughter of Irish and Dutch-Hungarian parents. O’Keeffe turned to the landscape to create a specifically American form of Modernism distinct from the European form and used traditional American icons such as the apple, the prairie and flowers, symbols of the American wilderness and its fecundity. She did not turn to abstraction before encountering and documenting the natural world. O’Keeffe loved to walk in the count

PAINTING WITH LIGHT at the TATE BRITAIN   This exhibition at the Tate Britain traces the influence of photography in the 19th century through to the modern era. Some of the great names of early photography such as William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877), are present in the exhibition but there are also unexpectedly obscure figures who are given prime position. The first room introduces us to the photographer Robert Adamson (1821-1848) and the painter David Octavius Hill (1802-1870) who established one of the first photographic studios in Edinburgh. Photography had been invented in 1839 although the camera obscura had been invented in ancient China and had been utilised by the artists of the Renaissance. During their four-year partnership Adamson and Octavius Hill took more than 4000 photographs in Edinburgh but it was their collaboration on the Disruption Portrait (1843-1866) a depiction of the rebel assembly that founded the Free Church of Scotland that initiates this exhibition. C

SICILY: CULTURE AND CONQUEST at the BRITISH MUSEUM   "So scatter brilliance over the island which Zeus Lord of Olympus gave to Persephone and, his hair falling forward with his nod, promised that he would raise up fertile Sicily with its high and prosperous cities to be pre-eminent on the plentiful earth! Pindar (c522-443BC) First Nemean Ode Between 800 and 700BC the early Greeks and Phoenicians began to colonise the island of Sicily and by 734 BC the Greeks had established their first settlement at Naxos.   Earlier peoples had lived on the island but little certain is known of them and the entire early period mostly consists of legend.   It is known that the early peoples valued the volcanic rock obsidian, obtained from the volcano that dominates the eastern half of the island, Mount Etna, but later peoples imported metal for making weapons.   Greeks began leaving the mainland to seek colonies under the pressure of population expansion.   Sicily was only one co

RUSSIA AND THE ARTS at the NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, LONDON The Age of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky The work presented at the National Portrait Gallery has been gathered from the collection of Pavel Tretyakov donated to the city of Moscow in 1892. In 1892 it was valued at 1.5 million roubles and comprised 2000 works of art. Today it forms the basis of the State Tretyakov Gallery, Russia's national gallery in Moscow. Tretyakov was a textile industrialist and collector who sought to create a portrait collection of Russia's leading intellectuals, authors, actors, composers and patrons of the arts, commissioning Russia's leading painters to portray them. Tretyakov created a survey of a Golden Age of Russian portraiture. The painters he employed initially followed a traditional, realist approach to painting then, following the art tendencies of the day, embarking on the new Impressionist style. Other commissions followed even after Tretyakov's death in 1898. The per

The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2016 At the 248 th Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, the trite, traditional artwork stands side by side with the modern and post-modern. Kitschy satires like Marie Antoinette, The Queens Hamlet by Pierre et Gilles, an image half-way between a photograph and an oil painting, evokes a Russian mail order bride rather than a chapter from the French Revolution. Retrospectives of a degraded future are encapsulated in works like 2 Hose Petrified Petrol Pump by Puerto Rican pairing Allora & Calzadilla, an ossified stone petrol pump the seeming remnant of a finished civilisation. The curators of the RA have themed the exhibition in terms of twins, pairs of artist collaborators but beyond that the artist’s relationship with gallery owners, critics and ultimately the public gaze. A new Gilbert and George work Beard Aware evokes a sense of anti-art, pop hysteria while also underlining our sense of surface appearances being deceptive as the duo flau

PERFORMANCE AND THE CAMERA AT THE TATE MODERN From the time when photography was in its infancy the tendency towards it evolution into the seventh art was palpable.  This is the topic of the Tate Modern’s latest exhibition Performance and the Camera .  Artists sought to connect individual shots into a performance, an enactment or re-enactment, that somehow also delved into the macabre or esoteric origins of the art form in its vital capture of a single moment in time.  The ephemeral became unique and indivisible, science presents photography, an art form capable of presenting a glimpse into eternity. The exhibition demonstrates that photography is a mediated, conventional form rather than a depiction of reality.  Yves Klein’s (1928-1962) work Saut dans la Vide (Leap into the Void, 1960) which was completed along with his collaborators Harry Shunk (1924-2006) and Janos Kender (1938-2009) shows the artist leaping from a building into fresh air.  Klein used the work